1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing a device (for example, a semiconductor device) comprising thin film elements such as thin film transistors, and a device manufactured by the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
A liquid crystal display device has features of being thin, lightweight, and low power consuming, and thus it is used for various electronic apparatuses such as in personal computers, mobile phones, digital still cameras, or liquid crystal televisions.
The liquid crystal display device is provided with pixel portions using thin film transistors. As the thin film transistor constituting the pixel portion, the inversely staggered type (or bottom gate type) structure constructed by forming a gate electrode on a substrate and laminating a semiconductor layer such as a channel region or a source/drain region or an insulating layer etc. thereon is being widely employed.
A pixel circuit of the liquid crystal display device is constructed by combining a scanning line for supplying a signal to the thin film transistor and the gate electrode, a data line for supplying a signal to one side of the source/drain region, or a pixel electrode connected to the other side of the source/drain region for applying voltage to a liquid crystal layer, etc.
The device such as the aforementioned liquid crystal display device is generally manufactured by repeating a process for forming a thin film by means of the vapor phase deposition method (that is, the vacuum process) such as the CVD method or the sputtering method and removing (etching) the unnecessary portion of the thin film by means of the photolithography method.
However, in this conventional manufacturing method, there are problems that (1) since the process comprising the film formation and the etching is repeated many times, the manufacturing time is long, (2) since much of the formed thin film is removed, the utilization efficiency of raw material is not good, and (3) since waste such as the etching solution is excessively generated, the processing cost thereof is increased. These disadvantages make it difficult to reduce the manufacturing cost in the conventional manufacturing method.
These problems become more remarkable as the glass substrate to be a basic material becomes larger with an increase in screen size of the liquid crystal display device. Further, these problems are not limited to the method of manufacturing the liquid crystal display device but common to the method of manufacturing various devices comprising the thin film devices such as the thin film transistors.
The present invention is made in view of the above problems and an object of the present invention is to provide a method of manufacturing a device making it possible to reduce the manufacturing cost.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a device making it possible to realize lower cost.